DECELERATION LAB

We're excited to announce the sixth cohort of the Deceleration Lab! See the announcement on BroadwayWorld

The Assembly’s Deceleration Lab supports artists in our broader community to lead new theatrical projects that use and experiment with multi-perspective, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative models of creation. These Labs are an invitation to develop new work outside the typical fast-paced style of production, to kick-start projects that take artistic risks, challenge traditional hierarchical structures, and create new professional opportunities for the participating artists.

The 2026-2027 Deceleration Lab projects are Antipodal Tour by Catalina Beltrán, Leiomyoma by Brett Robinson, and Onions and onions and onions and onions by the ensemble CAN TUNA. The Assembly is also partnering with previous Deceleration Lab artists to support the development of two additional works: a new work by theater band Friend of Friend titled all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well and a workshop of GUT (굿) by Soomi Kim.

The artists will share in-process showings of their work, which will be announced at a later date. Sign up for our mailing list to find out about upcoming Lab performances and future opportunities. To support the Deceleration Lab, make a tax deductible donation to The Assembly.

2026-2027 LAB ARTISTS

Brett Ashley Robinson: Leiomyoma

Brett Ashley Robinson

You feel the music pulsing beneath you, muffled, like womb sounds. Then the world explodes. Bursting into this intimate space is Leiomyoma, a dazzling, red, pop-princess fibroid. As she sings and moves (and bleeds), you feel the feral sensuality and strength of womanhood. But this is her last show, the night before her host’s myomectomy. Born of excess estrogen, Leio demands through her music to know why she was put here, insisting on her feminist right to exist. If she wasn't meant to be here, why did the doctors take so long to find her? Isn't it her right to grow? To her host she has given so much: strength through pain, raw ambition, and a confidence as her host steps further into self-actualization. All it costs is some blood, pain, and maybe her host's life.

As Leio reckons with her death, we can imagine a better life for her host. Leiomyoma is a drag cabaret about black women's health, ambition, and the myth of black excellence. Leio is the subject and object of the failures of the medical field concerning black women's health, standing in for those who negotiate a system that ignores their pain, are rewarded for perseverance, and fear that without their accomplishments, they would cease to exist. This cabaret asks audiences to share and cast off the weight of perfection to celebrate the simplicity and pleasure of their authentic self.

BRETT ASHLEY ROBINSON is a 2021 Pew Fellow as well as a Barrymore Award-winning actor director, theatremaker, and educator based in Philadelphia. She directed the world premiere of Abandon by James Ijames, which won the 2023 Barrymore for Outstanding Original Production. And her 2024 production of Once Upon a Bridge won the Philadelphia Award for Social Insight. She is the 2021 winner of the PEN America/ Jean Stein Oral History Grant for her original work Re-Enactment. She was also a semi-finalist for the Otto F. Haas Award for Emerging Artist and a two-time nominee for the Golden Tassel Jawn, Philadelphia’s Drag and Burlesque Awards, for best comedy act as Patricia! She was a collaborator and performer in Lightning Rod Special's The Appointment at New York Theatre Workshop, a New York Times Critics Pick and voted best play of 2019 in The New York Times, Vulture Magazine, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine.

As a director, she has created original theater and directed at The Wilma Theater, The Arden, Lantern Theater Company, Theater Exile, Tiny Dynamite, Inis Nua, The Bearded Ladies, Theater Horizon, Arcadia University, The University of the Arts, Drexel University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As an actor and devisor she has worked at UTR , Ars Nova Ant Fest, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Wilma, Lightning Rod Special, Pig Iron Theater Company, The Arden Theatre Company, InterAct Theatre Company, The Flea Theatre, Theatre Horizon, Asolo Rep and Geva Theatre.

As Patrica! she has worked with 1812 Productions, The Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Lightning Rod Special, Agitated! Portland Center Stage, JACK NY, Theater Exile, The Cannonball Festival, and Ars Nova AntFest. She has taught acting at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, University of the Arts, Desales University, and Drexel University. She is a company member of Applied Mechanics, an immersive theater company based in Philadelphia, and a member of the HotHouse–the Wilma Theater’s resident acting company. She loves a buck a shuck oyster and Vino Verde.

CAN TUNA: Onions and onions and onions and onions

A devised, multimedia puppet play about onions, trust, betting on the future, and what really happens when we put $100 in a Roth IRA. Jumping between a loose retelling of the events of 1958 Onion Futures Act, a real speculative investment placed at the beginning of the show, an economics lecture, and an ever-looming pile of onions, Onions is an attempt to feel our way through the nonsensical relationship between real value and speculative value.

CAN TUNA is a multi-disciplinary performance and storytelling collective. We enjoy filtering large, abstract ideas through small or ridiculous lenses, experimental forms with human hearts, and playing seriously. Previous: Three States of Matter, a climate migration adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (March 2025). Upcoming: Dodoland at The Tank, September 2026.

Anna Zheng

Jisoo Hope Yoon

Lana Tleimat

ANNA ZHENG (any) is a Chinese-American director, deviser, and writer. She is interested in acts of adaptation—of stories, of bodies, to other people, to inhospitable environments—and the ways we change ourselves and our narratives to survive in new spaces. They use playful interdisciplinary collaboration, adapted texts, and physical theatre to visceralize everyday realities and create unexpected, intimate, joyful messes. Recent directing: Dodoland (The Tank, CAN TUNA). Bane by London Carlisle (The PIT); Run all the way home (ODC Pilot 2025, SF); a dance theatre interpretation of Constellations by Nick Payne (Joe Goode Annex, IDA Stanford); Three States of Matter, a devised, adaptation of Three Sisters about climate migration. Anna is a member of the New York Neo Futurists.

JISOO HOPE YOON is a writer, translator, and researcher from Seoul working across fiction, theater, and video games. Her preoccupations include distance and departure, fragmented narratives, lay understandings of physics, technocriticism, and Korean culture as refracted through the Western gaze. Her short fiction has won prizes at Columbia Journal and Driftwood Press, her poetry translations have been published in And So On (Workroom Press, 2025). Her first book-length translation is forthcoming with New Directions in 2027. She is an alum of Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab and the BIPOC Critics Lab at the Public Theater. She is a facilitator and creative researcher at the Strother School of Radical Attention. Hope also works as a video game writer at LINE Games. MFA candidate: Creative Writing, Rutgers-Camden.

LANA TLEIMAT is a writer, fabricator, and puppeteer based in Brooklyn. She works as a sculptor in prop and scenic studios, working for clients such as Disney, Macy’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue. In her work, Lana is interested in exploring systems of inclusion and exclusion, inspired by her mixed racial and cultural heritage. Puppetry design credits include masks for Froggy by Jennifer Haley (Center REP, World Premiere), General Peaches for Puppets of War (NY Theater Festival, dir. Zach Marullo), and puppets for Medicine Men, debuting 2027 at Puppetopia (HERE). She was a puppeteer in Midnight Radio Show’s Dreamcats! (Gene Frankel Theater, dir. Charlotte Lily Gaspard). Her puppets have performed in the Edinburgh Fringe and San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Catalina Beltrán: Antipodal Tour

A transnational documentary theatre piece about a Colombian company that traveled to post-Cultural Revolution China in 1983, hoping to find themselves reflected, and finding something far more complicated. A story about disillusionment, and the questions every theatre artist eventually has to face: what are we doing this for, and who does it serve?

Catalina Beltrán

CATALINA BELTRÁN is a theater director originally from Bogotá, Colombia, now based in New York. She started making theater in Colombia, where movement-based, devised, and director-led work is predominant, and that foundation shapes everything she makes. She works with ensembles of actors and non actors, building pieces from the ground up through structural exploration, nonlinear forms, and a deep curiosity about what music and movement can teach a story that text alone cannot. Her work explores moral complexity, memory, and resilience, and she is actively developing her practice as a feminist artist and movement director. Recent work includes The Space We Share (The People's Theatre, Working Theater) and Nancy: An Elegy in Three Parts (ID Studio), a piece in development based on a true Colombian crime story. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is a 2025 Drama League Directors Project fellow and New Perspectives Women's Work Lab participant.

LAB ALUMNI PROJECT Friend of Friend: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well

all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well is a durational sonic meditation on the nature of prayer in the face of devastation.

FRIEND OF FRIEND (Andy Boyd, syd island, and Philip Santos Schaffer) is a theater band making shows at the intersection of queerness and spirituality. Their show Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone was developed with The Assembly’s Deceleration Lab and performed at University Settlement, the Brick, Joe’s Pub, and HERE Arts Center. IG | @fri3ndoffri3nd

syd island, Andy Boyd, and Philip Santos Schaffer

LAB ALUMNI PROJECT Soomi Kim: GUT (굿)

GUT (굿)

GUT (굿), the Korean word for ritual, is a full-length autobiographical theatre work by Soomi Kim exploring grief, memory, and intergenerational inheritance through a Korean American lens. Weaving bilingual Korean and English narrative, movement, memoir, projected media, and Korean shamanic traditions, GUT (굿) moves between the deeply personal and the ritualistic, opening one family’s story of loss into a larger, cathartic encounter with grief and release. At its center is the question: How can we let go when grief is a knot of longing and regret?

GUT (굿) has been developed with support and residencies from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, BAM Artist Residency, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor, MacDowell, Mercury Store, Center for Remembering & Sharing (CRS), HERE Arts Center, and The Assembly Theater’s Deceleration Lab.

Conceived, written, and performed by Soomi Kim, GUT (굿) is directed by Peter Kim and features Dax Valdes, Jae Woo, Zion Jang, Eunji Lim, and Ron Domingo. The creative team includes choreographic collaborator Yael Ben-Ezer, video designer Ein Kim, lighting designers Lucrecia Briceño & Emmanuel Delgado, and stage manager Mars Neri.

SOOMI KIM (she/her) is a New York City–based actor, theatre maker, and choreographer whose hybrid works merge text, movement, biography, and multimedia, centering Asian and Korean American narratives. Kim spearheaded a trilogy inspired by Asian American cultural figures whose lives were cut short: Lee/gendary, based on Bruce Lee; dictee: bells fall a peal to sky, inspired by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; and Chang(e), based on performance artist Kathy Change. Initiated and led by Kim, the works were developed collaboratively, with longtime collaborator Suzi Takahashi directing all three and Derek Nguyen co-writing Lee/gendary with Kim. Presented at HERE Arts Center, Culture Project, and the National Asian American Theatre Festivals, Lee/gendary received the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Production.

Her first autobiographical solo, MLCG (My Little China Girl), commissioned by Dixon Place, marked a turning point as Kim stepped more fully into writing and creating from her own family history. Subsequent works include Body Through Which the Dream Flows, created with an ensemble of competitive gymnasts and presented at New Ohio Theatre’s Ice Factory and The Tank, and Testing² at The Tank. Kim is currently developing GUT (굿), a bilingual performance work weaving Korean American family history, her late father’s memoir, choreography, and Korean ritual practices to investigate grief, memory, and inheritance.

Her honors and residencies include MacDowell, BAM Artist in Residence, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, Mercury Store, the NYC Women’s Fund, HERE Artist Residency Program, Mabou Mines, The Assembly Theater’s Deceleration Lab, and Orchard Project’s Greenhouse Lab. www.soomikim.com

Finalists for the 2026-2027 Deceleration Lab: BLACK/face on Butter by Jordan Ealey, Community Policing by Zachariah Ezer and Dominique Rider, How to Make Tom-Yum Soup by Tidtaya Sinutoke and Keng S. Meateanuwat, Lionfish by Ida Cuttler and Nick Hart, and Old Friends by Ashil Lee.

2025-2026 LAB ARTISTS

Alle Mims & Dezi Tibbs: Black Reconstruction in America

Dezi Tibbs

Black Reconstruction in America is a devised theatrical adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois' 700-page political essay, led by two research-driven Black theater artists with Southern roots. Mims and Tibbs will explore the historical and contemporary legacies of Reconstruction, connecting the text’s economic and racial insights to the present-day political landscape.

DEZI TIBBS (they/she) is an artist obsessed with exploring how we fabulate and perform our identities. They believe that there are unspoken rules that govern our social interactions that are indicative of larger truths present in our society, and they work to unearth those rules in every theatrical world they excavate. Throughout their career as a freelance dramaturg, Dezi has had the opportunity to workshop dozens of original and established plays and musicals. They've facilitated the development of new and established work with esteemed collaborators such as Tony Nominees Sam Pinkleton (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812), Lileana Blain Cruz (Skin of Our Teeth), Max Vernon (K-Pop), Erin Courtney, Truth Future Bachman (2023 Jonathan Larson Award Finalist), and many others. Dezi's work has been featured on stages and festivals nationwide, including the New York Theatre Workshop, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Powerhouse Theatre, Joe's Pub, Lincoln Center, Wilma Theater, Breaking the Binary, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

ALLE MIMS (they/them) is a Black, biracial queer artist living in NYC. They are a cultural archeologist and political satirist who writes about Black, Queer, and Radical History. Mims earned their BA in Drama from Texas Woman’s University (’16) and MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University (’23) under the instruction of Lynn Nottage and David Henry Hwang. While at Columbia, they also studied early 20th century Black Radical history and fell in love with the Archive. Mims now primarily uses first- and second-hand sources to dramatize Black, Radical and Queer History for the stage and screen. Mims is a current Critical Breaks Artist with Hi-ARTS (’24-25) where they are continuing to develop their play, “A Soviet Film on Negro Life in America,” which tells the story of Langston Hughes’s trip to Moscow in 1932. Mims currently works as a researcher for the August Wilson Society. They have been commissioned by theGrio (“Harlem and Moscow,” audio drama), Bishop Arts Theatre (The How To Be Antiracist Project), and Imprint Theatreworks (“The Tree: An American Musical”). www.allemims.com

Alle Mims

Tianding He, Xuanqi Liu, Brian Ellis & Menghang Wu: 心esthesia

Tianding He

Xuanqi Liu

Brian Ellis

心esthesia, a trans-sensory performance installation, reimagines the dreams of Deaf individuals through movement, sound, scent, taste, and interactive media. Conceived by Tianding He with sound artist Xuanqi Liu and choreographer Menghang Wu, the work uses motion sensors and generative sound to create immersive environments. The piece translates stories shared in American Sign Language into a multisensory experience that expands traditional sensory access and aesthetic form.

TIANDING HE (Lead Artist, Director) is an experimental theatre director, multidisciplinary artist, and arts leader originally from China and based in NY & LA. Her work integrates object performance, physical theatre, and interactive technology to challenge anthropocentric worldviews and center accessible, trans-sensory aesthetics. She is the founding artistic director of B·O·N·D International Virtual Performance Festival and a member of NYFA’s Incubator for Arts & Culture Leaders of Color. Her performances have been presented at HERE Arts Center, La MaMa, Rattlestick Theater, New Ohio Theatre’s Ice Factory Festival, Dixon Place, Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance, UNFIX Festival, Wuzhen Theatre Festival (China), and other platforms across the U.S. and the globe. She associate directed Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway production Salesman之死. Tianding has held residencies with the Object Movement Festival, Orchard Project, and Dumbo Six Foot Platform, and has contributed to major institutions including Lincoln Center and The Little Island. She’s a proud Associate Member of SDC. MA: NYU, Performance Studies; Hunter College, Theater. PhD: UC Irvine & UC San Diego.

XUANQI LIU (Sound Artist) is a performer, musician, and multi-media artist whose work spans experimental sound, contemporary classical, electroacoustic music, and interdisciplinary performance. Initially inspired by minimalism, everyday sounds, and images, she devoted her creativity to the diverse art scene, including live performance, contemporary dance, inter-media, and drawing. Her work engages with multimedia practices, incorporating nature themes, cultural experiences and folkloric histories through music, drawing, video, and sound to allow audiences the chance to explore their own curiosities of the world. Xuanqi’s works have been performed at the Yarn/Wire International Institute Festival, SICPP and Valencia International Performing Art summer festival. She has collaborated with a variety of outstanding musicians including Georgia Privitera, Anna D’Errico, Madeline Hildebrand, Thomas Gauthier. Xuanqi’s works were also presented in The International Computer Music Conference 2023, the Web Audio Conference 2024 and the Sound and Music Computing 2024, The MOXsonic Festival 2025. She holds an M.M. in Computer Music from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and is pursuing a PhD in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology at the UCI.

BRIAN ELLIS (Creative Techno Artist) is a creative coder, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. His artistic drive lies in using code to democratize creative expression. He founded the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble to explore this concept through the medium of dance, writes participatory chamber music to explore it through concert music settings, and develops open source tools to enable others to create similar work.

Brian maintains many performance practices, incorporating classical guitar, mountain dulcimer, live electronics, and no-input-mixing. He also built and maintains motion-into-midi.com, an open-source tool that lets anyone do motion capture with just their laptop.

As a composer, Brian writes chamber music that focuses on audience collaboration, often employing QR codes, cellphone orchestras, and movement-based reactivity, and has worked with Third Coast Percussion, Chromic Duo, Unheard-of Ensemble, Bergamot String Quartet, The Arm, Apply Triangle, the Subaerial Collective, the Playground Ensemble, and members of zFestival and SōSI. He has presented works with Lincoln Center, the NY Philharmonic, 21st Century Guitar Conference, ICMC, TURN UP, SEAMUS, MICC, SPLICE, NYU-ITP, NYCEMF, and ROCC.

Brian has degrees in Music and Computer Science from UT Austin, and has previously studied with Nina Young, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Celil Refik Kaya, Russell Pinkston, David Coll, and Sky Macklay.

MENGHANG WU (Movement Artist) is a dancer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges contemporary movement, somatic practice, and experimental performance. Trained in ballet and modern dance since childhood, she has performed internationally across China, the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, collaborating with artists such as Hagit Yakira, Richard Chappell, and Jarkko Partanen. Her choreographic process often blends emotional gesture, spatial improvisation, and collective devising, with a focus on the interplay between body, object, and technology. Drawing from her background in Dance and Performance Studies, Menghang approaches movement as both aesthetic and philosophical inquiry. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges practice and theory, exploring how movement, objects, sound and environments co-produce experimental possibilities.

Honorable mention for the 2025-2026 Deceleration Lab: Đavid Lee Huỳnh & Lizzie Nguyen’s project ăn chút noi chút.

Finalists: Christie Zhao’s Sawmill, Matthew Antoci’s Paradisbukta, Mikhl Yashinsky’s Der zingeryung (The Balladeer’s Apprentice), Brett Robinson’s Leiomyoma, Liz Appel & Ashley Olive Teague’s Time Exiles, and Ethan Gould’s Unruly Figures.

Menghang Wu

2023-2024 LAB ARTISTS

Minna Lee: Memory Bear

Using an interactive installation of talking stuffed animals, Memory Bear invites visitors to witness a series of stories shared by Minna, their Hmong family members, and you. Over 100 customized plush toys with voice recorders will gently guide each visitor through this unreliable magic we call memory. Memory Bear insists that you slow down and notice as much as you can.

MINNA LEE is a Hmong-Vietnamese American writer and animator living on Lenapehoking who enjoys sharing stories about South East Asian mythology and queer love. Their play, My Home on the Moon, will have its World Premiere at San Francisco Playhouse in January 2024. Minna is a 2022 Sesame Workshop Fellow and MFA Playwriting candidate at Hunter College (24').

Minna Lee

Lillian White & Erin Amlicke: Kingdom Come

Lillian White

Kingdom Come is an experimental response to G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, a metaphysical thriller detailing turn-of-the-century anxieties around anarchism that still ring true today. This is a world where nothing is what it seems, identity is unstable, masks are removed to reveal more masks, and anarchist and police personae dissolve into each other. Drawing on the novella as well as historical research around political and artistic movements of the early 20th century, we are creating a visually striking, improvisational performance in which the audience participates with us in a sort of tender, irreverent rehearsal for more revolutionary living. Building on a previous developmental workshop at Burning Coal Theatre, creators Lillian White and Erin Amlicke are thrilled to bring the next stages of this project to life through the Deceleration Lab.

LILLIAN WHITE (she/her) – Director / Deviser – Originally from South Carolina, Lillian makes theater in New York, the Carolinas and Peru. Her artistic perspective is shaped by rural roots and global travels, which inspire a passion for dynamic, elemental performance that stokes the imagination and asks big questions. Her work has been seen in and outside of traditional theater spaces at the BorderLight Festival, HERE Art Center, Dixon Place, Governor’s Island, Grafton Reintegration Center, Burning Coal Theatre, SETC, Asheville Fringe Festival, the Darlington GOPO, as well as La Alianza Francesa and El Galpón (Peru). In 2019, Julie Taymor sent her to Latin America to study theater, which opened the door to ongoing international research and collaboration. www.lillianwootenwhite.com

ERIN AMLICKE (she/her) – Writer / Actor – is a queer playwright and actor, hailing from Nashville, TN and based in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. Her plays have been produced by Burning Coal Theatre (Selene and the Dream Eater - staged production) and Dixon Place (& Light & Light & Light - staged reading). Erin’s work as a multidisciplinary artist began with Playtime, a subterranean, immersive play that she directed at Oberlin College. She continues working as a writer, actor, and deviser, making sometimes magical and often surreal plays in order to disrupt expectation, encourage childlike wonder and reveal the absurdities of late stage capitalism. She has also performed at Theatre at Monmouth, Hangar Theatre, Cherry Artspace, The Navigator’s Theatre Company, The Brick Theatre, Smart Mouth Theatre Company, and Juneberry Collective. She is a graduate of the University of Houston’s MFA in Acting program. www.erinamlicke.com

Erin Amlicke

2022 LAB ARTISTS

Andy Boyd, syd island, Philip Santos Schaffer: Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone

Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone will be an acoustic hyperpop folk opera about gender, celebrity, belief, and slander exploring the life of Publick Universal Friend (PUF) - an American mystic who had a vision in 1776 in which they were told by two angels to preach the word of God. From the moment of their vision on, the newly reborn PUF refused to use gendered pronouns or presentation, and when asked what gender they were, would simply reply “I am that I am.” Room, Room, Room will incorporate experimental and contemporary queer music as well as ecstatic religious music and group-singing. The performance will highlight questions of queer history, and investigate the realities of intentionally antagonistic second hand sources. While problematizing the American vision of utopia, we aim to invoke a temporary genderless/genderful? utopia with our audience (even if just for a second).

Andy Boyd

syd island

Screen Shot 2022-04-18 at 11.53.49 AM.png

Philip Santos Schaffer

ANDY BOYD is a playwright based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, where he studied with David Henry Hwang, Lynn Nottage, Charles Mee, Kelly Stuart, and Doug Wright. His plays have been produced by Theater in Asylum, Naked Theatre Company, IRT Theater, and Epic Theatre Company. His plays have been developed or presented at/by Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, The Kennedy Center, Roundabout Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Contemporary Theater Company, The Trunk Space, Columbia University, Marquette University, and Harvard University. He is the host of the New Books in Performing Arts Podcast and the co-host with Danny Erickson of the socialist theatre podcast Better than Shakespeare. His work has been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts.

syd island (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary, Black, "biracial," performing, music, and visual artist currently based in Canarsie, Lenapehoking (so-called Sunset Park, Brooklyn, NY). as a vocalist and music creator, syd enjoys collaborating on various musical styles from improvisational experimental music to medieval sacred choral music. they have experience as a dancer/performer in devised and improvised experimental dance. as a visual artist, they document their life through colorful self-portraits and create digital and watercolor protest posters. syd has a BA in Music Theory, History, and Composition from Brown University and is a graduate of Arizona School for the Arts. they have performed at Roulette Intermedium, the Exponential Festival, Judson Memorial Church, and the Brick Theater.

PHILIP SANTOS SCHAFFER (they/he) is a playmaker creating interactive performances in intimate and unconventional settings. Philip’s work has been seen in bathtubs across the country, listened to over the phone, and found in a series of living rooms (as well as appearing in more traditional spaces). Philip’s work deals with politics, pop culture, intimacy and empathy through participation, humor, music, and more. Philip has a BFA in Directing from Hofstra University and an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University. Philip is 1/5 of the creative team behind WalkUpArts, which they co-founded in 2015.

Soomi Kim: Body Through Which the Dream Flows

Body Through Which the Dream Flows is dance/acro theatre work about gymnastics in the time of the #metoo and #cancelculture movements and will feature veteran coach, choreographer and theatre artist Soomi Kim as well as 6-7 competitive gymnasts. It began in 2018 after the scandal broke about Dr. Larry Nassar’s systemic sexual abuse of 100s of gymnasts. The culture of gymnastics quickly unraveled as USAG was under fire for their role in enabling the culture of sexual and emotional abuse (and most recently. The FBI’s lack of action). Outraged, Kim felt it essential to merge her professions as a competitive coach and theatre maker. Through dance & acrobatics, text and ensemble devising work, Body.. will intersect Kim’s personal gymnastics history, the deconstruction of the governing body of the sport and personal stories from gymnasts (age 11-17) in order to help us to better understand the moment we are in now. This project is told from an insider’s lens and will explore original forms with non-actor gymnasts in this never before seen “downtown theatre style” performance.

Soomi Kim (Photo by Debora Lopez)

Theater maker SOOMI KIM (Lead Artist) is a New York City based actor/movement artist and has conceived (and co-devised with director Suzi Takahashi) a trilogy of work based on Asian American visionaries: Lee/gendary, dictee: bells fall a peal to sky and Chang(e). Chang(e) was developed through the HERE Artist in Residency Program (2012-2015). Dictee: bells fall a peal to sky (dance theatre adaptation of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee) premiered at Culture Project's Women Center Stage Festival in 2012. Lee/gendary ran at HERE Arts Center’s main stage. Kim’s autobiographical dance theatre show, MLCG (My Little China Girl) was commissioned by Dixon Place (2017). Awards: HERE A.I.R. (2015), Dixon Place commission (2017), Orchard Project's Greenhouse Lab (2020-21), Marble House A.I.R. (2019), Hemispheric Institute (2014), Asian Arts Intiative (2012 & 2013), Mabou Mines A.I.R. (2014). In 2018 she was named Coach of the Year at Chelsea Piers, NY and is the founder of GymKim Choreo LLC. www.soomikim.com | www.gymkimchoreo.com | IG: @soomdawg

BTWtheDF- Gymnasts_Ai Clancy, Madison Rodriguez, Lucy Meola, Shayna Wilson, Olivia Carabal

Ai Clancy, Madison Rodriguez, Lucy Meola, Shayna Wilson, Olivia Caraballoso, Nora Avci (Photos by Riley Dunbar & Soomi Kim)

Written and Choreographed by Soomi Kim
Co-directed by Meghan Finn and Soomi Kim
Movement generated by the company

Choreography Consultant Alexandra Beller
Dramaturge Sarah Gancher
Stage Manager Mars Neri
Sound Designer Zeke Stewart
Lighting Designer Amanda Ringger

Video Designer David Pym

Featuring Soomi Kim, Lucy Meola, Olivia Caraballoso, Ai Clancy, Madison Rodriguez, Shayna Wilson and Nora Avci

2021 LAB ARTISTS

Melisa Tien: Untitled Landscape

Melisa Tien

A project that Melisa has been developing with director Tamilla Woodard, Untitled Landscape aims to map out the common occurrences that, together, make up a human life. The project utilizes an audience-centered devised-work process that features audience input in the creation of the text as well as their participation in the presentation of the work. Building off previous collaborations with theater performers, they are inviting specific communities of non-actors to take part in participant-centered devising workshops, each one possessing its own unique, inherent theatricality. As with untitled landscapes in the visual arts, every human's existence has its own defining characteristics but also displays common contours that denote it unmistakably as a lived life.

MELISA TIEN is a playwright, lyricist, librettist, and producer. She is the author of the plays Best Life, The Boyd Show, Yellow Card Red Card, and Familium Vulgare, co-author of the music-theater works Swell, Daylight Saving, and Mary, co-producer of the podcast/audio series Acting Listening, and a participating artist in Post Theatrical, a national wave of plays by mail. She has been published in the anthology Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, Spring 2020), and has authored essays for New Music USA and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance. A New Dramatists resident playwright, Melisa is a recipient of a grant from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre, a commissionee of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan Project, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting. She teaches experimental theatrical writing at Sarah Lawrence College. BA, UCLA; MFA, Columbia University. Her sporadically updated website: www.melisatien.com

Dante Green: Levi's Big Leap

Dante Green

A new musical by Dante Green. When little Levi's family is mysteriously forced out of their small-town home of Rural, Pennsylvania, he decides this is the PERFECT opportunity to escape capitalist imperialist society. He begins his own American Dream with his best (NOT) girlfriend Maddison and their mangy mutt Meatball. With twenty-four hours remaining, Levi encounters fear (and racism) on his journey and discovers deep dark secrets about his all too ignorant town along the way, including the reason why his family had to move in the first place.

DANTE GREEN (they/he/she) is a black, queer, multi-hyphenate artist. Their artistic endeavors dive deep into the cosmic condition of living and breathing in a world where everybody's just pretending to know what they're doing. Using sound as an artery for their work, Dante invents new, always magical, sometimes whimsical perspectives that the human ear might find familiar, and always want to linger. They are an alumnus of UArts with a BFA in Directing, Playwriting, and Production, focused on writing and directing for Musical Theatre, as well as Headlong Performance Institute. Dante is the Artistic Director of The Makers' Ensemble, a member of the Network of Ensemble Theaters, a member of FoolsFury, and an affiliate of Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Dante's work has been seen at places including Ars Nova, Painted Bride Art Center, Pig Iron Theater Company, and FringeArts. Dante has worked internationally with other companies such as The Public Theater, Virgin Voyages, Lantern Theater Company, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, FoolsFury, The Assembly, and others.

2020 LAB ARTISTS

Nehassaiu deGannes: EBB & lo' (working title)

Nehassaiu deGannes in SEAGULLMACHINE

Photo by Theo Cote for La MaMa

What If Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father forbade her & all her siblings (brothers & sisters) from marrying, because he knew there was a black Jamaican ancestor or two swimming in their blood? EBB & lo' is a devised exegesis of love & (Caribbean) blackness, race & repatriation, taboo, erasure, literary genius, distance & otherness.

Created by Nehassaiu deGannes

Digital theater director/co-conceptual artist Shoshanah Tarkow

In collaboration with Toree Alexandre, Peter Anderson, Adam Burnett, Debbie Bernstein, Kimiye Corwin, Kelley Faulkner, Lynnette Freeman, Robin Galloway, Lisa Green, Lian-Marie Holmes, LaWanda Hopkins, Cloteal Horne, Rosamond S. King, Kate MacCluggage, Tanya Anderson Martin, Antonio Miniño, Kate Mulley, Christianna Nelson, lisa nevada, Ravin Patterson, Erin Margaret Pettigrew, Cristina Quintana (CQ), Kerrie Seymour, Dorcas Sowunmi, Michele Shupe, Moira Stone, Cherry Lou Sy & Sandy York

NEHASSAIU DEGANNES is an actress and poet and has appeared at theaters in New York, regionally and internationally, including Stratford Festival of Canada, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Studio Theatre, DC, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Soho Rep, LaMama, Cleveland Play House and The McCarter Theater. She was cited as the "Best Performance In A Play 2017" by The Wall Street Journal for her portrayal of "Esther" in Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel at Shakespeare & Co. Her solo-show Door of No Return, originally produced by Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown University, has been presented at several theatres and colleges in NY and the Northeast.

Nehassaiu's first book-length collection of poems, Music for Exile, is being published by Tupelo Press in February 2021. Her publications also include Undressing The River, winner of the 2011 Center For Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Award, and Percussion, Salt & Honey, winner of the Philbrick Poetry Prize for New England Poets. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Poem Memoir Story, American Poetry Review, Caribbean Writer, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tuesday: An Art Project, TORCH, Encyclopedia Project, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery Anthology, ARAVA Review, and Cave Canem Anthology XII. Her work has been honored with poetry fellowships from Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center, Rhode Island State Council on The Arts as well as The Berkshire Theater Critics Award for her 3-character “tour de force” in Liz Duffy Adams’ Or,. Her poem "To Find, To Be" was recently shortlisted for The Montreal International Poetry Prize. Nehassaiu received her MFA from Brown University, is a graduate of Trinity Rep Conservatory and this fall is teaching acting for Princeton University. www.nehassaiu.com

Matthew Paul Olmos: You Will Swim Oceans

Matthew Paul Olmos

You Will Swim Oceans is a theatrical piece in which a Mexican father attempts to teach a Caucasian mother a song for children, which was passed down in his family. Through the teaching of this song, we explore the perceived ownership of cultural identity and legacy, as well the fear which clouds the air between us as we attempt to embrace change as a country. The piece features an original composition by April Dawn Guthrie, is directed by Larissa Lury, and features Bernardo Cubria and Danielle Slavick.

MATTHEW PAUL OLMOS is a three-time Sundance Institute Fellowship/Residency recipient, New Dramatists Resident Playwright, Center Theatre Group LA Workshop Playwright, Oregon Shakespeare Festival Black Swan Playwright, Princess Grace Awardee, selected by Taylor Mac for Cherry Lane's Mentor Project, and La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Emerging Playwright Awardee; selected by Sam Shepard. He spent two years as a Mabou Mines/SUITE Resident Artist being mentored by Ruth Maleczech; former New York Theatre Workshop Fellow, Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident, Dramatists Guild Fellow, Primary Stages Playwright, INTAR playwright; and is an Ensemble Studio Theater lifetime member, Echo Resident Playwright, and Kilroys nominator. His work is produced internationally and nationally, published by Samuel French and NoPassport, and is taught in university. Currently developing We Walk Along the Christmas Bridge, with composer April Dawn Guthrie, in part through Center Theatre Group’s LA Workshop, and a new piece inspired by Samatha Power’s “The Education of an Idealist” through the Geffen Playhouse. matthewpaulolmos.com

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Bernardo Cubria and Danielle Slavick in YOU WILL SWIM OCEANS

The Deceleration Lab is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council.